Military sexual assault reports have increased by 50 percent in the last year.

Both of these recent headlines really hit home for me, as two members of my family have been sexually assaulted. Also when I was at Texas A&M University, a fellow student attempted to sexually assault me.

I have spent a lot of time looking into the plethora of issues regarding sexual assaults, and the facts are chilling.

It is particularly bad for college females, the largest group of adult victims. Of the 20 percent of college females that are assaulted nationwide, it is thought that only 12 percent report the crime and of those an appallingly low 4 percent are prosecuted.

It is no wonder that women do not report the crime when they can see that it is very unlikely that the rapist will be punished.

When I read that a few months ago, I started examining barriers to successful prosecution of this awful crime.

In Texas, I believe a big barrier is the definition of consent and non-consent in the sexual assaults of adults.

Basically, the victim has to be in some way incapacitated and, therefore, unable to give consent for the crime to be considered sexual assault.

As a young girl, I was always told, “No means no.”

However, that is not exactly true in Texas. In fact, one of the assistant district attorneys in Brazos County, which is home to Texas A&M University, the higher education institution with the largest student enrollment in the state, told me that “no” doesn't mean that, and he has had to explain it to many sexual assault victims.

In other words, just saying no doesn't necessarily make a rape. After hearing that, I looked into the statutes in other states, and some of them define nonconsent as when the victim indicates nonconsent through words or actions.

If we had this definition added to our laws in Texas, “no” would mean “no.”

Another surprise to me is with regard to bond conditions for those individuals who are arrested for sexual assaults. I assumed that every defendant would be restricted from contact with the victim if he wanted to get out of jail after arrest and before trial.

But not all prosecutors ask for this, and not all judges grant it when asked. No contact with the victim is mandatory only if the victim is a child in Texas.

Making noncontact with the victim mandatory for adult victims hopefully would give the victims a higher sense of security and, therefore, make them more willing to cooperate in prosecution.

I plan to work with our Texas legislators to make these and other revisions to our sexual assault laws. I hope that together we can improve the statistics leading to an increase in successful prosecutions and just punishments.

If you have other ideas for improvements, I would like to hear from you. Please contact me at lbirkman@wilco.org